It’s hip2b2

Emily of Textually.org has this interesting link to an ingenious mobile anti-theft device. The product is from Singapore and it is called PhoneBak (pretty dorky name).

When a cellphone is lost or stolen and a different SIM card is inserted, the technology will automatically send an SMS notifying two numbers chosen by the owner. The SMS will show the number of the person using the phone and the location, which can then be used by the police to trace the culprit. This is possible because the SMS will show the cellphone identification (ID) of the terminal to which the telephone is connected, the country ID and current network. The SMS will be sent without notifying the new user.

Based on the information from the website, this is a Symbian application that automatically runs during start-up. It probably has a configuration phase where it detects the IMEI and IMSI of the current handset. The destination phone numbers are also configured during this one time configuration. After this is done, everytime the phone starts-up the IMEI and IMSI are checked. If there is a mismatch then the SMS messages (with the CellID, IMEI, IMSI and MSISDN) are sent.

The idea is great and not very hard to implement. Here are the ingredients:

• Auto-Start. So that we can have this application run all the time at start-up.
• IMEI retrieval. To obtain the IMEI from the handset and format it.
• IMSI retrieval. To retrieve the IMSI from the SIM identifying the original subscriber of the service.
• CellID retrieval. To retrieve the current CellID which can be used to determine the general location of the thief.
• SMS Messaging. To be able to send SMS messages.

So what are you Symbian developers waiting for? Of course, the next problem is how to prevent the uninstallation of this program. Hmmm.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 11:14 am and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.